Re: git use pattern questions

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 8, 2009, 12:29 UTC
Message-ID: <20090608122929.GE13775@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <e4a904790906080206t51ee260ve64304d8c1147ebc@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 10:06:50AM +0100, Alex K wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> I would like to publish a repository on say github but I would still
> like to hide sensitive information from a config file which
> nevertheless needs to be part of the repo. If it was possible to
> publish a single branch then I'd make one especially for github and
> publish the config file with something like "your password here"...
> 
> Would you know what's the best pattern to publish a repository but
> still hide sensitive information such as values of passwords, mysq
> port etc..?

That is not really possible with git. If you publish a branch, all of its contents will be visible to anyone who clones it. You _could_ keep a pristine branch without any config, do your development there, and then merge it to a branch with the secret config file in it. And then just publish the development branch. I suspect that would become a pain in the long run, as you would need to commit and merge in order to do a test.

Generally, I think the strategy people use is not to put the config file into git at all. Put in a sample for people to read, but keep your personal one as a purely local thing. You will then have to deal with deployment of the tracked files and the config file separately (but usually people don't deploy directly using git; they use "make install" or rsync or whatever from their git checkout).

-Peff